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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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  1. Higher standards for filing a case to begin with

This could be a good thing, but I'm concerned about cases where people don't have the evidence up front and need to get it through discovery. People with very legitimate cases can end up in that situation.

  1. Another similar option, just ban someone from seeking further redress for a while (forever?) if they're found to be constantly abusing the courts.

This is a thing in some jurisdictions: recognized "vexatious litigants" have to get the court's pre-approval before filing further complaints. However, standards for being a vexatious litigant are high.

Lowering the bar to be declared a vexatious litigant is a possible avenue of reform that might make a difference at the margins.

The counterpoint is that it’s quite easy to use this kind of thing to cost tge opposition money and waste their time defending themselves against these kinds of suits which make them fairly effective in chilling speech. If I can be sued in hopes of finding the information out that means im obliged to pay for a lawyer and waste weeks or months of time trying to defend myself. This would have a chilling effect as if I don’t want to spend millions defending myself I might not run a story on the Hunter Laptop, not because I believe it’s not true, but because defending myself from lawfare is too high a cost for my platform to deal with.